From NEHJ: For UConn, no time like the present

The folks with the University of
Connecticut hockey team started talking about writer Spencer
Johnson’s story “The Precious Present” about
halfway through last season.

As it turned out,
Johnson’s timeless message of living life fully and
appreciating the moment might have been even more timely this time
around when David Berard (West Warwick, R.I.), who has been
UConn’s interim head coach for most of the season, brought it
up again this year after Christmas.

“We have a little
saying,” said sophomore forward Cody Sharib of Needham, Mass.
“The precious present. Don’t worry about the future.
Learn from the past, but don’t dwell on it.”

Life around the UConn hockey
program has been a bit topsy-turvy over the past nine months or so,
and in some ways this season has been a bit of a balancing act.
First came the official word in June that UConn had accepted an
invitation to join the Hockey East Association for the 2014-15
season.

“It’s exciting for
the program, especially considering the league we’re going
into,” Berard said. “In our opinion, and in a lot of
people’s opinion, Hockey East is the best hockey conference
in the country, and to be asked to be part of that is certainly
exciting.”

But it’s also two seasons
away. “We have the whole Hockey East thing coming up, but we
want to focus on this season and next and try to do something in
Atlantic Hockey before we leave,” Sharib said. “I grew
up right outside Boston and to hear about Hockey East was wicked
exiting for me. My whole family is in Boston and I’ll be able
to play in front of them in two years. But now we want to try and
make an impact in Atlantic Hockey. We have two years left to try
and win it all.”

Buoyed by the Hockey East news
and their finish last season when they gave Atlantic Hockey
tournament champion Air Force all kinds of problems before falling
in three games in the quarterfinals, the Huskies came into this
season with high hopes.

Then they got off to an 0-4-1
start. That stretch included 3-0 and 5-0 losses at Niagara on Nov.
2 and 3. Three days after that, Bruce Marshall (West Boylston,
Mass.), a UConn graduate and the team’s head coach for the
past 25 years, announced he was taking an indefinite medical leave
of absence. Berard, in his second year at UConn after 15 years as
an assistant at Providence College, took over the head coaching
duties.

“As tough as our start
was, I think when Bruce announced his medical leave that served as
a wakeup call for everybody,” Berard said. “It was,
‘We’ve got to get going here. We can’t let
opportunities continue to pass us by.’ The players and
coaches and staff came together and dealt with the adversity. We
could have taken the other road and felt sorry for ourselves and
wondered what else could go wrong.”

The Huskies (10-11-3, 7-8-2 AHA)
beat Sacred Heart, 5-3, in their first game without Marshall for
their first win. The next night they went to Merrimack and beat the
Hockey East team, 3-1.

Starts and stops continued from
there and they began to get more consistent. UConn took a nice pair
from Air Force, 2-1 and 3-2 in overtime at home, and then lost a
couple at Canisius, 3-0 and 3-1.

The Huskies struggled to score
goals for a while, but then start turning that around, too. They
scored 21 goals in their first 13 games and then 22 in their next
six into mid-January.

Marshall announced he would not
be coming back and was resigning Jan. 7. Marshall had 337 wins as
UConn coach.

“That wasn’t the
best news,” Berard said. “But he’s in a good
place and I’m happy for him. He’s healthy. He needed to
take some time and then made a decision. He’s at a stage in
life where he wants to take another route.”

UConn announced it would conduct
a national search for a coach after the season. Berard hopes the
search doesn’t have to extend outside of Storrs and past the
Husky locker room.

“Certainly I’m going
to do what I can do in my power to give them an option to look my
way,” he said. “At the end of the day, they’re
going to do what they feel is right and best for UConn. I
understand that.”

In the meantime, there is a
season to be played and plans to be made for next year and Hockey
East beyond that. UConn is offering scholarships for hockey for the
first time as part of the move to Hockey East, and five or so
scholarship players will come in next fall as the school builds
toward a full allotment of 18.

The Huskies have played one or
two Hockey East teams each season for years, and games against
Providence and Merrimack, or perhaps Boston College or Boston
University, are possible for next year.

All schools, of course, play a
balancing act as they recruit and plan for the future while keeping
an eye on the ball or puck right in front of them. It just might be
that things are a little more pronounced these days in Storrs with
a big move on the horizon.

The precious present steams
forward with the Atlantic Hockey playoffs approaching. The message
can hit home in athletics, Berard said.

“What happens sometimes
with athletes is they can bring the past in when they’re in a
slump and they start thinking about a missed opportunity,” he
said. “Or they start thinking about expectations and what
they want in the future. Sometimes that can add pressure on you. We
talk about staying focused on today and not worrying about what
happened yesterday and not worrying about what’s going to
happen in the future.”

The future will come. UConn will
move into its new league and, Berard said, as it does in all of its
athletics and academics and everything else it gets involved in,
will strive for excellence and not settle for anything less.

For now, there’s a
season-plus left to play in Atlantic Hockey, and seniors like
goalie Garrett Bartus and forward Sean Ambrosie and junior forwards
such as Jordan Sims and Brant Harris will attempt to lead the
Huskies on a long run.

“Just take it day to day
and do what we need to do to be a better team at the end of the
day,” Berard said. “Hockey East will come. We owe it to
the guys we have in the locker room right now to play for a
championship this year. Two years will come. Let’s take care
of business between now and then.”